Since the nation’s first health Community Health Centers opened in 1965, expansion of the federally supported health center system to over 1,400 organizations has created an affordable health care option for more than 30 million people. Health centers in every state, U.S. territory, and the District of Columbia, provide care to patients, regardless of ability to pay.
Health centers help increase access to crucial primary care by reducing barriers such as cost, lack of insurance, distance, and language for their patients. In doing so, health centers — also called Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) — provide substantial benefits to the country and its health care system.
I know I haven't posted much the past few days; part of this is due to dealing with the snowstorm which hit us here in the midwest (snow day for my kid, broken snowblower, etc.), while part was due to prepping for a healthcare town hall event I participated in last evening.
The town hall was centered on healthcare at the county level. Oakland County, Michigan, has over 1.25 million residents, and after decades of solid Republican control, a combination of last year's "blue wave" election plus the death of longtime GOP County Executive L. Brooks Patterson over the summer has resulted in Democrats taking control of both the executive and legislative branches of county government for the first time in forever.
Welp. In the end, enough Democrats joined Republicans in both the U.S. Senate and House to pass a massive spending bill in the dead of night. Donald Trump signed it into law early this morning.
Needless to say, I'm not happy at all about a major missing piece of the bill: The DREAM act, which would protect around 690,000 young adults who were brought to the United States as children, was not part of the bill. The Dems in the Senate were able to lock in a formal immigration debate which will presumably be focused in large part on DACA and the Dreamers, but there was no such guaranteed baked in on the House side by Speaker Paul Ryan. Personally, I'm pretty disappointed with the 73 Dems who folded on the issue, but the fight isn't over yet.
